The start of a new Chapter, or, my Kings of war Addiction.

Long have I been interested in 28mm mass fantasy battles.
However I’ve never had the drive to paint an army, there are many reasons for this;

I could’t afford it, I had no willing opponents, painting tones of the exact same mini is infuriatingly dull, GW changed the WFB rules and army lists to quickly for me to keep up with it in terms of painting and financially not to mention just how badly the game went down hill.

There is more but that’s all boring.

Kings of War has me invigorated and excited I’m churning units out like there is no tomorrow, well by my usual standard anyway. I was lucky to pick up a load of stuff at very reasonable prices from a friend of mine over a period where I could afford it and now It’s getting close to its début on the table.

I’ve been working on the centrepiece for my undead army a diorama multi based zombie legion, I’ll drop in pics of the process and some text about how I did it, please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.

Thanks for looking.

Almost done just the vapour trail from the cannon ball to finish

I call it the cycle of unlife

there are zombies bursting from the grave

And being eviscerated by artillery fire

Nasty accurate artillery fire

I also thought about the fact that zombies would be swarming with flies and bugs so the would attract the bats

this is the basic build with cork mat ground, a mix of sand grit and PVA for edging, coffee stirrer fencing, and a bit of a stick as a tree stump. then a gouge cut out for the cannon strike and the base for the gravestone with bats and the hole to have the zombie clambering from.

some of the tombstones

I added In a bit of pinning wire for the cannon ball to get added to and some milliput to smooth out the cannon strike trench, undercoated grey then base coated brown with spray paints.

started painting the tree stump

inked the broken ground for shading then dry brushed

i used flock on the graves and static grass else where to make the graves stand out

and just steadily built up the amount of undead on the base

I added a few bats to the heads of some zombies to make it look like the flock was spreading out over the legion.

Winter warriors

These two are from a range called urban war, I don’t know anything about it, I picked them up from a friend at the club just because I liked the look of them.

I started off with a black base coat and then a dark gray zenithal shade sprayed from about a 50 degree angle favouring the left hand side of the model, followed a lighter gray tone and finally a white. The second layers of highlighting are done at shallower angles.

This gave a good directional shading making it look like that was the way the light is shining from.

I didn’t really paint these as such, I used ink washes for the colour letting the highlights show through. I only really painted a bit of brass on the helmets and some gun parts, plus a small highlight on the uniforms. A mix of red and yellow just to make the padding pop.

I added in some weathering powder, held in place by adding alcohol. (no I didn’t use drinkable stuff)

The base detail was made using Milli-put then gradients of Brown to hive better depth, finally satin coat varnish for the water.

Static grass (melting snow mix) and a few bits of leaf scatter are held in place by thinned down PVA.

I found the sand bags in my bits box they were painted the same way with a mix of sepia and yellow ink.

Thanks again for looking.

It’s been a while.

Welcome back to the table, now that you can get back into it.
I haven’t posted for quite some time as I’ve not been able to access my painting table, now that I have I went bit mental and have three new finished projects.

I will update a bit more in detail about each one shortly.
Also I’ve been scratch building some spaceships to use with the “Babylon 5 A Call to Arms” rules set. More on that when they are in a photo friendly state.
I have the bug again and my brushes are ready to go, so expect more soon.
Thanks for looking.

Sláine the horned god

This has bee quite an interesting wee journey, I love the Character of Sláine and have been a fan of the comic since I was about eight or nine, so being able to paint this miniature at this point in my painting career was an awesome treat and challenge.
Over the last few weeks I have been watching a series of videos from Miniwargaming.com, and my skills and techniques have, in my opinion, improved vastly.
This was the first time I have used the wet blending method with Vallejo acrylic paint retarder, this method was used on the cloak and kilt (before detailing was added) other methods included dry-brushing and ink washes.
If you would, please notice the boil on his abdomen, it was a casting flaw I hadn’t noticed until I was doing the zenithal shading. Turning a flaw into a feature is one of those things you learn over time.
The one thing that made the biggest difference to my abilities was realising that when it comes to painting miniatures there is now wrong or right its just what you like and what works for you.
The only thing I’m not happy with is the way some of the tattoos turned out, free hand painting on detail is not my strong point.

Thanks for looking folks and I hope you like the results.

Heroquest mummy take 2

Well it’s been a while since I last posted a pic of one of my minis. I’ve just finished this second mummy from the old MB/Games Workshop Heroquest board game, I am fairly sure I posted pics of the last one I did. But I’ll post again so you can see how my style is improving. This is the new one, started with zenithal shading and has been directionally highlighted. I used some Humbrol weathering powder on the feet and lower legs. The static grass is African savanna mix. Also there is a lightly sprayed mat coat as well.

Paladin with sword and sheild of Fancyness +5

my display case

What you see before you is the prototype display case made to my specifications, by my Big Bro Drew from Handy Woodcrafts. If you can get him to make you one it will be done better, due to this being a test run.

table top violence!

He’s a bit cool ain’t he. He comes from a company called heresy they do some cool stuff.
I added the sword, it was a spare part from the ‘Job’s a good un Boris’ model by the same company, and made the sword loop from green stuff, obviously I did the base my self.
There will be pic’s of Boris, he is finished but I want to do a full blog post on my Mordhiem warband when it’s all done and ready to be photographed.

A ghost of his former self

I had taken a break, of several years, from painting.
When I started back this was one of the first things I did.
-It looks like its from the reaper dark haven legends set-
I did it a bit differently to what I had done before. I found my style had changed, I was exploring more possibilities and not worrying what people might say about it.
It was at that point I started to realise there was no wrong way to paint, No mistakes to make (apart from bleeding colour across boarders) its what you want it to look like that counts.
Have fun with it and explore the possibilities.

what am I?

This hard ass looking dude is from the Reaper miniatures ‘warlord’ range.

http://www.reapermini.com/Miniatures/warlord/

He’s an ork boss type in that world, but I have painted him up to be usable as a black ork, a demon, a mini minotaur or a beastman champion, it all depends on your imagination, see hat you want when you do these things don’t fall into the trap of – I must paint this the way the producers say, and I must use it only as the creature it was ment to be in the game it was made for.
Fantasy is there to let you escape the constraints, not to put more upon you.

That’s one of the main themes behind the game I’m inventing.
Watch this space.